Annemarie Roeper. Ed.D., (1918–2012) was an intrepid pioneer in the field of gifted education, with a focus on the emotional development of each child’s unique individual Self. An educational consultant for more than fifty years, she specialized in the educational needs of gifted and creative children.

Annemarie was born in Vienna to parents who founded a series of schools focusing on the “psychoanalytic understanding of human development and a desire to educate children to build and thrive in a pluralistic, democratic society”—principles that helped to shape her ideas about what education should be. Her family was Jewish, and when the Nazi party came to power, she and her father fled Austria in the spring of 1937 with the help of George Roeper, continuing on to the United States in 1939. Annemarie married George, and in 1941 they founded the Roeper School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, one of the nation’s oldest and best-known private schools for gifted children. Annemarie and George wanted the Roeper School to be a place that, by teaching personal motivation and encouraging critical thinking skills and analysis, would educate children so that they would not follow leadership blindly, as the Roepers believed had happened to many people in Germany.

Annemarie received her honorary doctorate in education from Eastern Michigan University in 1978. She edited the Roeper Review, a national journal on gifted child education, and authored several books and hundreds of articles on giftedness. She received numerous awards and honors for her work, including the 1999 National Association for Gifted Children’s President’s Award, an honor rarely bestowed. Her last printed chapter appears in the book Off the Charts.